The Desire to Make

I totally blame my recent research for tomorrow's issue of The Scrap Basket. Yesterday when I had a couple of hours to sew, I glanced at the scraps covering my design wall, at the stack of modern-minded hexies piled on my ironing board, and even at 2 wips in the closet, you know, the kind with deadlines. But what I was really itching to make was a quarter log cabin block. A quilt full of them would have been better, but that wasn't going to happen in the time allowed, so I settled for 1 block.

Working from Heather Jones' Half Way Home tutorial just up on the Robert Kaufman website, I literally pulled from the scrap basket as I began to sew, seeking a very neutral palette and as many linen-cotton blends as I could dig up.

When the block was done, it measured only 9"x12", yet I had the urge to just quilt it up and make it into a mini quilt. Why not? So I gathered a handful of Aurifil 50wt threads - a variety to make things interesting - and got started. When a project is this small, even matchstick quilting takes almost no time at all.

I bound this little one while watching TV last night, reflecting on how satisfying a sew it was. Not preplanned in the least, but out of an impulse to make grew an inkling of a project, which soon materialized into something small yet fulfilling. How good can it get?